The article is actually talking about just one crazy idea on one weblog; but, hey, The New York Times knows a trend when they see one, and don’t stand in their way! The article does laud, however, the self-correcting nature of weblogging reality, in which the accumulation of readers’ comments is (usually) precipitated by a crackpot post. Except, of course, on FmH, which operates off in its own little corner of the universe in defiance of consensus reality, unperturbed…

This is my annual reprise of an FmH New Year’s Day post from years past:

Years ago, the Boston Globe ran a January 1st article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article; especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions. A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point:

“Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.

“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.

“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”

The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:

“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”

Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.

In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. A similar New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.

In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings.

In China, papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune.

Elsewhere: pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France; banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year; going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland; making sure the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland is a tall dark haired visitor. Water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits. Cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin. It is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.

However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come!

Has anyone read Mary Douglas’ classic, Purity and Danger? It is a treatise on the ways in which what is considered impure or contaminated is socially determined. The boundaries between purity and impurity serve symbolic purposes to maintain social order and coherency. The uncleanliness of the corpse is one of those things. The assertion after every mass disaster about needing to bury the dead rapidly to avoid disease is so automatic and unquestioned that it has always seemed to me that the public health need it meets is more likely in the emotional realm than the infectious disease one.

One of the progenitor weblogs is back!

Google has established a page of links to agencies providing disaster relief in the wake of the tsunami. There is a link to it front and center on their search page, if you haven’t already noticed. Rumor has it they have already raised $5 million from putting up this page. In general, online giving to tsunami relief has been of an unprecedented magnitude, far outstripping donations after 9-11 for example. People need to realize that the devastated areas will have relief needs for years to come, so give much but give often.

This ingenious article from the British Medical Journal is a formal case presentation, such as we write as a matter of course in medicine, of Gollum, discussing the differential diagnosis — psychiatric or medical? — of his behavioral disturbance. As it is a collaboration by a number of medical students and a lecturer from the Department of Mental Health Sciences of the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, you can predict where their conclusions will lie.

This Scientific American piece reviews research challenging the commonsense notion that self-esteem is good for you and that low self-esteem is the root of many problems in functioning. Quite the converse may be true; I have previously written about the insidious effects of our society’s encouragement of narcissism, and the skeptical research findings here support a revisionist approach. This has many implications for us who are mental health practitioners. I have followed thinking on the evolutionary value of depression, for example; under certain circumstances, a pessimistic, unambitious stance may be adaptive, self-protective… and more realistic. Should it necessarily be abolished with treatment in all instances?

Video game skills make surgeons more precise, and sophisticated game technology may be entering both the surgical curriculum and the operating room itself. (Wired)

I suggested in my earlier piece on Yuschenko’s poisoning that the assertion that those who perpetrated the dioxin poisoning were seeking to kill him rapidly is a red herring issue. That dioxin does not induce death throes rapidly does not mean it is not an incredibly toxic and, untimately deadly, chemical. The hidden agenda in this specious argument against its ‘politicization’ is an ignorant attempt to undermine public policy meant to address environmental toxins.

“Why should animals help out stricken humans – does it prove that altruism is a natural instinct?” (Guardian.UK)

“The Polymeal: a more natural, safer, and probably tastier (than the Polypill) strategy to reduce cardiovascular disease by more than 75%.” (British Medical Journal)

Explanations invoke the often-noticed ability of animals to sense danger. At first blush, you don’t need to invoke a ‘sixth sense’ here; it is easy to imagine animals’ alarm when the earth moves beneath their feet in an earthquake. But what would lead them to expect a tidal wave and move to higher ground? Certainly it could not be accounted for on the basis of natural selection, as such a disaster does not happen frequently enough to exert selective pressure. There are more things in heaven and earth…

“Emergence of society may have spurred growth. The sophistication of the human brain is not simply the result of steady evolution, according to new research. Instead, humans are truly privileged animals with brains that have developed in a type of extraordinarily fast evolution that is unique to the species.” (Guardian.UK)

“What does the fashion for books about the state of the English language tell us? People care about their language because it forms part of their identity, and part of the resistance to changes in English is a resistance to change itself. But correct usage is not an elite affectation; it is a badge of competence,” says Richard Jenkyns (Prospect).

Because of changes in the logical directory structure at my webserver, you will get unpredictable results if you use the older form of the URL for FmH, of the form “http://world.std.com/[some subdirectories here]/followme.html”.

Please check your bookmarks, blogrolls, etc., and make sure you are using either of the following two (equivalent) URLs instead:

• http://gelwan.com/followme.html
• http://theworld.com/~emg/followme.html

I would prefer it if you would use the “…gelwan.com” version, as that will still work if I change hosts at some point in the future, rather than requiring a redirect.

Urge Bush to Increase Aid for Tsunami Victims:

Death Toll Climbs to 63,000 (Yahoo!)

A Third of the Dead in Undersea Quake Are Said to Be Children: “Survivors arranged for mass burials and searched for tens of thousands of the missing in countries thousands of miles apart.” (New York Times )

[I cribbed most of these from another site where the author had the temerity to copyright the list. More concerned about getting a feather in their cap for righteousness than disseminating the information broadly and sharing it freely, I guess…]

The year’s best jazz recordings, per Fred Kaplan. Slate

Former CIA analyst “Ray McGovern picks up the story that American papers have been slow to grasp: China and Russia have agreed to conduct joint military activities, in China, in 2005.” (Tom Paine)

“Thirty movers and shakers in British culture look back on an eventful year” in the arts. (Guardian.UK)

Guard Reports Serious Drop in Enlistment: “In the latest signs of strains on the military from the war in Iraq, the Army National Guard announced on Thursday that it had fallen 30 percent below its recruiting goals in the last two months and would offer new incentives, including enlistment bonuses of up to $15,000.” (New York Times ) Unfortunately, enlistment bonuses or not, all this is going to lead to is acceleration of the stop-loss program and pressure for a draft…

A reader sent me this very different take on Yuschenko’s disfiguring ailment by Justin Raimundo. He claims we should not accept uncritically the universal conclusion from the press that Yuschenko was poisoned, especially because it comes from the administrative director of the Viennese clinic where he was evaluated, not the medical director, who resigned during the furor after reportedly having his life threatened for disputing the conclusions his boss had announced. Raimundo has little besides this circumstantial evidence, his instincts that something was funny about the ‘poisoned-by-the-bad-guys’ scenario, his mistrust of the mainstream media, and the assumptions he cites of several others to the effect that the story is anti-Russian propaganda spread by reactionary elements in the U.S. Just because a story fits the worldview of the powers-that-be doesn’t a priori mean it is false, it seems to me, although it makes it far more likely [grin]…

A similar assumption that the mainstream media version is either “misinformation or disiinformation” appears here, although his piece is colored by the weblog’s a priori agenda of showing that the US press does not understand Europe.

Then there is this medical weblog which argues against the dioxin-poisoning assertions on two grounds. First, the weblogger does not think dioxin makes a good murder weapon because it takes so long to kill. This assumes the aim of the poisoner was assassination, which is not at all a given. Things in Slavic politics are inevitably more Byzantine and complex than we would assume them to be; perhaps grotesque disfigurement, making a mockery of visibility and popularity, and a slow gruesome death better serve someone’s needs…

Second is the medical dictum that ‘an uncommon presentation of a common disease is more likely than a common presentation of an uncommon disease’. The weblogger suggests that Yuschenko’s presentation is much more consistent with alcoholic pancreatitis and an alcohol-induced eruption of the skin disease rosacea than with the characteristic chloracne rash of dioxin poisoning. But like all good medical rules of thumb, this one must be evaluated thoughtfully. I think the explosive onset of Yuschenko’s disfigurement (if we are to take it as true that the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos are only two years apart) would be such a stratospherically uncommon presentation of a common disease that the chloracne hypothesis is actually indeed more likely (although, I emphasize as a psychiatrist, it is a long time since I studied any toxicology). Now I do not know much about Viktor Yuschenko’s private life, but I hope that the assumption that medical complications of alcohol are a likely scenario for him reflects more than just a stereotypical prejudice about the likelihood that a Slavic male is a problem drinker…

Finally, let us be reminded that those who accuse others of being credulous leave themselves open to the same charge of credulity. Despite Raimundo’s take on it, it was not only the Austrian clinic that has concluded Yuschenko was dioxin-toxic. An independent analysis by a Dutch toxicologist found massive levels of dioxin in his tissue samples — “the second-highest level of dioxin poisoning ever recorded in a human – more than 6,000 times the normal concentration” (Guardian.UK), if the Guardian‘s reporting is not suspect.

Somewhere in my whirlwind tour through this issue, I saw a reader comment contrasting the mainstream’s readiness to embrace the poisoning theory in Yuschenko’s case with the scorn heaped on suggestions that Arafat was poisoned by the enemies of the Palestinians. I agree that the truth of a matter can be as easily obscured as elucidated by the reportage (and the weblogging) it receives; I would be interested in your comments on either or both of these issues.

Tibetan Buddhist Internet Radio

“…One of the most breathtaking ever built” says one architectural critic. (BBC)

McCain is clearly positioning himself to pick up the pieces of Bush’s failure in 2008. I read the “…have the team that he wants around him…” comment as being about letting him have enough rope. Unfortunately, whether it is McCain or a Democrat who will inherit the mess, as the Bush administration fails, so goes the country and the world in the meanwhile.

A new weblog — Mind Hacks: “Neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what’s going on inside your brain. Mind Hacks is a book by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb.“

From the Sunday Times of London:

“I’m not particularly proud of being visceral, but I am admitting it. My attacks on George Bush have nothing to do with science or the scientific method. I just can’t stand the man’s style, the way he swaggers and struts and smirks and the way he looks sly and deceitful and the way Americans can’t see it. I’m irritated by the way they think he’s just a regular guy you can have a drink with.” [thanks, abby]

Spoiler alert: If you are a fan of The Wire and have last night’s episode on TiVo and haven’t watched it yet, don’t read any further, and certainly don’t read the New York Times story to which the blink points. Not only does HBO seem to have no compunctions about killing off major characters in many of its dramatic series, but the actors seem to find out only when they get the scripts for the episode in which they meet their end. [As to the details, I actually thought Stringer Bell wwas going to get whacked by crony Avon Barksdale, not Omar.]

The article discusses the ‘insanity defense’, which has been based on 19th century science bearing on individual responsibility for one’s actions.

The insanity defense has fallen into disfavor because of the public perception that it is abused, especially since the acquittal of John Hinckley in his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. But, as a neuroscience-grounded psychiatrist (it is forensic psychiatrists who evaluate and testify on the criminal responsibility of criminal suspects), I grapple with questions of whether my patients have the ability to conform themselves to standards of right and wrong all the time. I support a modern, scientifically-informed insanity defense as much as I decry its abuse as a slick defense tactic. Those who are legitimately not responsible for their actions are entitled to the defense and ought not to be penalized because others will misuse the insanity plea. On first blush, there is nothing special about the insanity plea in this regard. The burden of providing opportunities for justice inevitably leaves loopholes in many areas. The answer is to close the loopholes rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But there is something special about a plea of insanity, which is the public’s lack of understanding of the nature of mental illness (and, for that matter, of free will). In general, psychiatric disturbance is stigmatized and its bearer is seen as ‘bad rather than mad’. Much as there is a special burden on the court system not to err against suspects of color because of the historical reality of racism in our society, there ought to be a parallel burden not to err against mentally ill suspects.

Related:

How the Justice System Criminalizes Mental Illness — Brent Staples (New York Times op-ed)

And:

In a timely coincidence comes this story in which it is suggested that bizarre and dangerous behavior not otherwise easily understood (although not in this case direct violence towards others) may relate to the relapse of a disease process. (Yahoo! News)

You know about Google Suggest by now, right? It is a page with a Google searchbox which drops down a list of autocompletions, based on popularity, of the search term you are starting to type into the box. Here is the Suggested Google Alphabet (he means the Google Suggest Alphabet, more properly):

And Jerry Kindall suggests an ego-ranking based on Google Suggest. Every term gets a score x.y in which x is the number of letters you have to type in to get your name on the drop-down list, and y is the position of your name in the list when it shows up. Gelwan is 8.4 and Follow Me Here is 11.1, for example. Keep in mind, however, that those rankings change with the relative popularity of the search.

This I don’t understand. With food supplies dwindling at the Space Station, NASA says that if there is more than around a two-week delay in the scheduled Christmas Day Russian resupply mission, they will have to evacuate the astronauts. But if they can mount a mission to evacuate at that point, why can’t they mount a mission to merely deliver some more food??

I am surprised at The Times [or should I be?]. It is obvious that it was an appointment that was bound to run into confirmation difficulties from the inception, and not because of any domestic help issues. I imagine the Democrats signalled that his recent questionable performance in training security forces for our WoT®, which role Bush did not even mention in announcing the appointment, was not going to be passed over in the confirmation hearings. Then there are questions about shady financial dealings and rumors that high level Homeland Security staff were panic-stricken about the appointment. Hasty choice indeed.

It has been pointed out that the real loser in the Kerik debacle may be Rudy Giuliani. Kerik was his protegé and he was pushing for the nomination. What price will he pay for embarrassing the imperious Bush, who can never take responsibility for his own mistakes?

Healthy But Laments ‘Too Many Doughnuts’: “A team of 10 doctors led by Dr. Richard Tubb, Bush’s personal physician, and Dr. Kenneth Cooper, head of the Cooper Aerobics Center, issued a statement saying they ‘find him to be fit for duty and have every reasonable expectation that he will remain fit for duty for the duration of his presidency.'” (Reuters) I continue to maintain that the public is as much entitled to an annual accounting of the mental health of its commander-in-chief as the physical, but apparently no evaluation was done and no conclusions drawn in this sphere. All we know is that he is a good liar and a sniggering smirker.

Martin Kelley, a Pennsylvania Quaker who edits Nonviolence.org, was called by a CBS publicist with a tip that CBS was “doing a program on an issue that’s central to Nonviolence.org’s mandate: conscientious resistance to military service.” He posted a brief entry on this, thinking it would interest his readers, but has been linked to by the “who’s who of blogging gliteratti” as exemplifying the vast left wing media conspiracy. Kelley begs to differ, and avows that the media court the top political weblogs all the time.

The site has thoughtful primers on the philosophy of nonviolence, its history, a ‘pacifist dictionary’, war tax resistance, conscientious objection, direct action, voluntary simplicity and resistance to the Iraq war and militarism in general. And he could use small PayPal donations.

And:

Martin Kelley’s Ranter site is a ‘“blog” commentary on many topics, most notably Quaker theology & peace issues. If I had to be pigeon-holed I’d say that I’m a Post-Liberal Christian, a Hicksite Conservative Quaker, and an Emergent-Church curious Gen-Xer.”

Yes, ‘accountable’. Three years of his life (less time off for good behavior) = the lost fifty?sixty? years of his victim’s. That’s American accounting for you. And American ‘mercy’ as well.

Healthy But Laments ‘Too Many Doughnuts’: “A team of 10 doctors led by Dr. Richard Tubb, Bush’s personal physician, and Dr. Kenneth Cooper, head of the Cooper Aerobics Center, issued a statement saying they ‘find him to be fit for duty and have every reasonable expectation that he will remain fit for duty for the duration of his presidency.'” (Reuters) I continue to maintain that the public is as much entitled to an annual accounting of the mental health of its commander-in-chief as the physical, but apparently no evaluation was done and no conclusions drawn in this sphere. All we know is that he is a good liar and a sniggering smirker.

Also:

On the 56th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Progress Report explores the US’s declining moral leadership.

Mental Notes is a weblog by a Texas psychiatrist. In his sidebar, he has compiled a list of other weblogs by psychiatrists. In addition to listing mine, here are his other links:

• Shrinkette
• Rebel Doctor
• PsychNotes
• Brainworld
• Dr Jones
• Thoughts from the Headoc
• Adrian Warncock
• Intueri
• Interest Free

I have browsed them a little. It should not surprise you that they are quite diverse from both stylistic and content perspectives. Other than for completeness’ sake, some would never belong on any self-respecting blogroll of mine. Several are eloquent and fascinating. Please consider sending me any other links to psychiatrists’ weblogs you find, so I can keep the list up to date.

Here’s what Donna Wentworth says in a recent post to her Copyfight weblog:

Here is what I have said from the inception of FmH:

Early on, when it still seemed necessary to explain to people what this weblogging stuff was all about, this was on the main page of FmH. Now the link takes you to my “About FmH” page. My usage of the term was already old by 2001 when I revisited it in response to a reader’s question.

You will notice that I use ‘blink’ simply as a contraction of web+link, while Wentworth is making more of a distinction between the one-liners and the extended weblog entries. Perhaps she was not reading weblogs when almost all blinks were one-liners and weblogs were exactly that — annotated logs of one’s websurfing, so that others in your social circle could see what was interesting you. That’s what I saw when I woke up to the weblog phenomenon over the latter half of 1999, and that was the nature of the weblogs that directly inspired me — honeyguide, camworld, rebecca’s pocket, and the late lamented robot wisdom, for instance. While there were also online diaries or journals as well, the two phenomena did not converge for awhile longer. It was a long time before I dared to think readers would be receptive to any post longer than about a three-sentence paragraph.

The only notice my usage of the term ‘blink’ got was a peevish comment once on MetaFilter from someone who found it too cutesy. (I can no longer find it by searching MeFi, alas.) I couldn’t take too much umbrage at him, however, because his dig at me was in the context of trashing the fact that the word ‘weblog’ had universally been replaced by ‘blog’, a phenomenon about which I share his disdain. [I know, I know, I’m not being consistent. Maybe if ‘blink’ became overwhelmingly popular, I wouldn’t like it either. Story of my life… — FmH] And no one has even deigned to notice that I proposed using it as a verb as well.

Since to my knowledge the usage of ‘blink’ has so thoroughly failed to take hold, I wonder how in the world Bruce Umbaugh recognizes I should get the credit.

“When someone famous or otherwise notable dies, The Memory Hole often files a FOIA request for his or her FBI file. We post the ones we receive, but not everyone has a file. Mainly for the aid of other researchers, this page contains a running list of deceased people who are not the subject of a file, according to the FBI’s FOIA office.” (Memory Hole via pas-au-delà) [It’s a short list. — FmH]

Most of you have heard by now of the story of the potential oil spill from the breakup of a disabled Malaysian freighter in the Aleutians yesterday, and the Coast Goard helicopter crash during the attempt to rescue the stranded crew. I first heard coverage of this on NPR and puzzled over the name of the island where the calamity has ensued — Unalaska. At first I could not figure out, literal me, why they kept referring to this as an Alaskan story if it happened at an Un-Alaskan location. Does anyone know how Unalaska came by its name?

My prayers go out, by the way, for rapid containment of the oil spill. From what I understand, No. 6 fuel oil is nasty stuff, and there are 500,000 gallons of it on the foundering ship.

Another fascinating fact I learned in the NPR coverage was that the nearby town, Dutch Harbor AK, is apparently the US’ largest producer of processed seafood products (like the fish that goes into fast food fish sandwiches).

Adam, in sending me this poignant story, mentioned other anecdotes he has seen establishing that animals grieve their dead companions. This search (Google ) will be revealing if you want to pursue it further (although, sorry, because of the syntax I used, it includes some items about grieving for departed animals as well as grieving by animals). Some of what I find poignant in this article, however, lies in the anthropocentric attitude it betrays. An earlier version of the article actually had it in the headline; now it was altered (because of such criticism, I wonder??) but it is still the premise of the article that it is acceptable that the zoo keepers decided to allow the gorillas to mourn their loss. I know that in this instance, since Babs was euthanized, they had to deliberately determine to bring the body back into the gorillas’ enclosure for that purpose, but should it really be a matter for our discretion whether the animals we steward are allowed to grieve?

Also:

Although it is not exactly clear that the mental activity detected represents images flashing through the monkeys’ brains, it is suggestive of being a precursor of conceptual representation and thus closer to human thought than many had appreciated. The human ability for empathy for others of our kind is built on our capacity for a ‘theory of mind’; we can conceive of the mental experiences that must go through another’s mind based on our sense of congruence with our own inner experiences, to which we have introspective access. Does this study help us to conceive better of what must be going through a monkey’s mind under certain circumstances, implying that we can begin to have a theory of monkey mind and thus a more empathic connection to our primate cousins than otherwise?

By the way. if Spec. Wilson is, as described in press coverage, “a disgruntled soldier,” there were hundreds or thousands gathered to hear Rumsfeld. What most of the media clips of this interchange did not include was the rousing wolf-whistles and cheers that went up from the assembled masses in response to his insolent question.

“The barriers that are meant to be protecting the world against killer diseases and nuclear war are crumbling, warns a high-powered report to the United Nations.” (New Scientist)

A Sentence: “Millions of inscrutable e-mail messages are clogging corporate computers by setting off requests for clarification, and many of the requests, in turn, are also chaotically written, resulting in whole cycles of confusion.” (New York Times )

Life Imitates Spam? (New Scientist)

In the ascendency of evolutionary psychology, recent decades have clarified how much influence one’s hereditary endowment exerts over behavioral factors. The current study focuses on socially responsible behavior, a.k.a. “being nice”, and finds the expected hereditary effect but also a robust influence of upbringing (New Scientist).

Does this surprise anyone, that one’s upbringing and, perhaps even more important, peer influences can affect one’s social competencies or kindness regardless of what temperamental variables one has inherited? The article phrases things interestingly in talking about genes for socially responsible behavior. Usually, it is expresed in the converse manner, that genes influence antisocial behavior or delinquency. Is this just a matter of semantics, or of the glass being half full vs. half empty? It seems to me something basic is at stake in conceptualizing what is commonly referred to as “human nature.” Are we inherently ‘good’, with flaws or lacks in our genetic makeup necessary to cause us to act in an antisocial manner? Or does it take something specific in our constitution to influence us to behave in a prosocial manner? Furthermore, there are implied notions of social structure in deciding what is antisocial. Prosocial behavior, as the evolutionary biologists grapple with it, has several distinct components that have to be explained separately. First there is cooperation and mutuality; it is rather easy to see how that conveys a selective advantage. But quite distinct from that as a foundation of the social contract is altruistic behavior (Google ), which has presented more of a challenge to explain evolutionarily.

I am actually surprised that a critic of the study is quoted as being surprised by the finding of an environmental impact on prosocial behavior. He comments that, if true, this is different from other personality variables. But it seems to me that prosociality or antisociality is not a personality variable, i.e. not a temperamental factor. It is rather, fundamentally, a way of behaving or a set of behaviors. It may be shoddy thinking to equate ‘niceness’ with social responsibility. Furthermore, antisocial behavior may not actually always be related to not being ‘nice’. The neurocognitive machinery for empathy may have alot to do with it as well or instead, and it is not a given that empathy and ‘niceness’ or kindness are conflated.

“The finding may explain why teenagers act compulsively and take more risks. It has been seized on by campaigners who want to ban the death penalty for under-18s in the US.” (New Scientist) Of course, the fact that teenagers have difficulty envisioning the consequences of their actions is no news to a parent or a teacher of one…

And:

Responsible Chefs Urge Consumers to Choose ‘Good’ Fish: